Postmortem: Oceanus Communications' Legacy Online

Legacy
Online's story started more than six years ago in an unlikely place:
Cuba. It was here that a group of Cuban students from the University of
Santa Clara (not to be confused with Santa Clara University in California)
embarked upon a crazy dream. While on blasting away at each other playing
games on a LAN, they decided to put their technical skills to use and
try to make a living developing videogames.

From
the beginning, the goal was to create a MMOG, something only a handful
of companies in the world had managed to do at the time. Since Cuba's
Internet connection then consisted of 56k modem for the entire island,
you can appreciate how ambitious this project was.

While
the initial development work was underway (working on a virtual Internet
simulated through the LAN of their university), the group managed to pitch
their idea to a Canadian working with a professor at their university
and Oceanus Communications was born. The team started traveling back and
forth from Cuba to Canada, testing the fruits of their work on the real
Internet, until a stable contingent of developers was established in Ottawa
and the real development work could start. The Canadian government's Pilot
Visa Project for skilled IT workers greatly facilitated this process.

Legacy
Online was originally called Star Peace.

Originally
called Star Peace, the game was an ambitious undertaking. The idea
was to bring together two of the most successful genres in the videogame
industry: city building and strategy games. The goal was to create an
all-encompassing experience that pit hundreds of players against each
other in a unique battlefield.

The
starting point was to create a realistic economic simulator in which players
would participate as interstellar tycoons, growing their business by building
factories, retail outlets, warehouses other buildings necessary to develop
and sustain a thriving society on new planets. These planets would start
off empty, and would slowly be populated by simulated citizens immigrating
from Earth.

To
foster player interaction and a realistic environment, a political component
was added to the mix. Players could be elected as Mayors of cities and
Presidents of planets. This also provided players with another goal: apart
from becoming immensely rich and developing a planet, they could choose
to leave behind a legacy of providing good leadership, government and
city planning.

The
potential audience was huge. We felt many of the fans of city-building
games would love the concept and embrace the opportunity to test their
skills against real players. Another key innovation was the idea of a
MMOG that wasn't a role-playing game (at the time that was the only MMOG
genre). Interestingly, even today 90% of the MMOGs on the market are RPGs.

Legacy
Online launched on June 16th this year, but as an online game, it
is constantly a work in progress. We're continually building add-ons and
tweaking the game, but the bulk of the work is complete and we can take
a look at the challenges we've faced so far.